To improve such an app, a rails hacker may have to prove him/herself by prototyping improvements first.

Rails makes it possible actually “taking over” parts of a legacy app, by presenting the user with a rails UI that submits back to the original app. A prototype that works against the legacy app and is usable and testable by real users.

This session will present you with the techniques and tools you need to do this:

Along with this, we will discuss how we used this technique on a particular internal timetracking application, and in particular the lessons learned on how to navigate a Rails prototype into the political game in a world of legacy systems.

Screenscraping as a prototyping strategy could be just what you need in a political environment where it’s hard to convince management to build an existing legacy application in Rails.

Mads is the ideal co-presenter for this talk. He is a highly skilled programmer, very opinionated about software development, and also entertaining to listen to. We have quite some work to do, as we have plans to take this talk a step further. And Christian Dalager has promised to help us out, which makes me look very much forward to this. Not only the presentation itself. But also the process of creating our code. (For now, I can say only that we will be coding a tool to make it even easier to API-ify a legacy app.)